DESPITE THE continuing gripes of his critics, records released this week show that Senator John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam. The documents should put to rest claims that Kerry misrepresented his military record in the presidential race. But Kerry's failure to respond to the smear campaign launched against him last summer lent credibility to its real objective: to impugn his equally honorable opposition to the war. John O'Neill, a Houston lawyer and Kerry's adversary on the war since 1971, acknowledged as much in a telephone interview Wednesday. ''We produced seven commercials," he said of his anti-Kerry group, now called Swift...

I may have been too quick and too generous in giving John Kerry the benefit of the doubt about the full and complete release of his military records, as reported by the Boston Globe on Tuesday. As Thomas Lipscomb details in today's Chicago Sun-Times, some questions and confusion remain. The exact details will most likely get sorted out in time, but just for the moment let's consider the one aspect of this story that we know for sure: Kerry released his records exclusively to The Boston Globe. This is an odd decision for someone seeking end speculation regarding the whole...

Reader John Boyle writes: I have been yelling since last year that the Navy does not have Kerry's records, nor does DoD. The Navy has always been Kerry's hide-out. The Navy is covered by the Privacy Laws. You're a lawyer, right? The SF 180 is generically addressed to the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. These records are 30 to 40 years old. They are history! They do not stay at Navy Personnel Command forever. It seems to me that all of Kerry's tortured rhetoric on this subject attests to the fact that he was having his records vetted,...

Senator John F. Kerry, ending at least two years of refusal, has waived privacy restrictions and authorized the release of his full military and medical records. The records, which the Navy Personnel Command provided to the Globe, are mostly a duplication of what Kerry released during his 2004 campaign for president, including numerous commendations from commanding officers who later criticized Kerry's Vietnam service. The lack of any substantive new material about Kerry's military career in the documents raises the question of why Kerry refused for so long to waive privacy restrictions.

ANOTHER KERRY DISCHARGEBefore Memorial Day weekend, Sen. John Kerry sat down with editors of his hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe and announced that he had signed the form SF 180, authorizing the Department of Defense to grant access to all his military records. This, more than a year after he had claimed the press and public had seen all there was to see from his military record. Only one problem: according to several sources who formerly worked on the Kerry campaign, the senator expects that little to nothing new will be in the files that are released. "He's fairly confident...